Jill Klein: “I wrote my first poem five years ago during a mid-life crisis, after finding a packet of college essays. Who was this writer? Corporate work and staying home with kids had somehow silenced me. I heard a podcast of Heather McHugh’s ‘What He Thought’ soon after. A character in the poem offers his definition of poetry, pointing to a statue of a man burned for heresy and muzzled as he died—‘poetry/ is what he thought, but did not say.’ Not all thoughts are poetic, but unspoken poetry seems tragic. I live in Silicon Valley with my engineering husband, and now baby our cats and bougainvillea.”